Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Welcome from your President

I am honored to be the 90th President of the UCLA Faculty Women's Club, founded in 1918. I look forward to working with so many talented, dedicated, and resourceful women on the Executive Board and across the entire membership. Your incoming board is eager to offer six General Meetings, all held at the Faculty Center (see below about our speaker on October 16th). A highlight of the year is the Scholarship Dinner Meeting on February 5th honoring our accomplished FWC scholarship recipients.

Our Special Interest Sections are organized around various interests; examples include:

Athletic activities (e.g., biking, tennis, tai chi)

Social gatherings (e.g., let's do lunch, birthdays, international cooking, knitting)

Reading (e.g., book sections, play-reading)

Languages (e.g., conversation in French, German, Spanish)

Cultural outings (e.g., galleries and sights)

Table games (e.g., bridge, mah jongg)

We want to hear from YOU about your interests and those sections you find especially relevant. We do hope you will participate in many sections (and start off new ones).

UCLA Faculty Women's Club is proud to announce our October General Meeting. Our guest speakers, Barbara J. Natterson-Horowitz, MD and KathrynBowers will be speaking about "Zoobiquity: A species-spanning approach to health." The topic describes and discusses a relatively new interdisciplinary approach to medicine that brings together physicians and veterinarians to treat the diseases shared by humans and many similar species.

Two books were raffled at the general meeting: by the speakers, another by Ercegovac.

Rochelle Caballero was the recipient of Zorana's book.

Ray Dewey performed on the piano in honor of Daniel Pearl World Music Days. To learn more both about Daniel Pearl and Judea Pearl, please visit the story about the Turing Award Winner Professor Judea Pearl. The photo of the Pearls with Joyce and Zorana was taken at the Symposium celebrating Judea's Award, October 22 at UCLA.

Announcements: President Zorana Ercegovac announced that Professor Lloyd Shapley won a Nobel Prize in economics. His late wife was our Faculty Women's Club member for many years. From the story by D. Romero:He's the sixth Nobel laureate from the Westwood school, according to UCLA. The 89-year-old shares the prize with Alvin E. Roth of Harvard. Here's why:Both the winners' research focused on how to best match "agents" -- buyer and seller, say -- in financial and other markets, according to the Nobel folks. Shapley is a noted game theorist and UCLA professor emeritus of economics whose work dates back to the 1950s and '60s.

Mr. Shapley explained how individuals can be paired together in a stable match even when they disagree about what qualities make the right match. The paper focused on designing an ideal, perfectly stable marriage market: that is, how mates find one another in a fair way, so that no one who is already married would want (and be able) to break off and pair up with someone else who is already married.

It was an elegant and simple mathematical model that explained the optimal way to match up men and women, and it was all written in basic English rather than complicated mathematical jargon.

About Me

The backgrounds in ethnomusicology, performance, philosophy, education, technology, and information studies have all converged in our mission: to offer the best research-supported learning and teaching that is classroom tested, interdisciplinary, open, and individualized in various contexts and modalities.